Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

out a hand, making the introductions. The tallest one with the forty-year-old mustache walked a
few paces away from them, stepping onto the road and craning his neck. They would later know
him as Salem. Hamza wondered if he had any idea what he was looking for.
“Should I sleep or are we not so far away?” Faisal asked. They were on the shuttle,
knocking shoulders.
At the front, Salem made noble efforts to try to speak to the driver, who had to yank the
wire from her ears each time before shoving the earpiece back in. “What can you buy for this
again?” He asked, pushing around coins on his palm, tilting it for the driver to see. A coin fell,
rattling around somewhere but the boy didn’t seem to even turn his head.
Hamza twisted his torso to look out the window. Raed sat on the other side of Hamza,
blocking most of his view of the window. He had a sharp nose and clean face, while the other
boys talked, he wormed his arms out of his coat. Raed was the one that had a beer on the plane,
not looking at any of the other boys much. He joined Hamza in the line earlier and pulled both
their bags along as they edged towards the passport control. Hamza let it happen, amused.
In the shuttle, Hamza tried not to sleep, although he felt invisible hands on his shoulders
trying to drag him down onto the fabric chair, to settle into the outdated neon triangle pattern.
The window was sliced neatly into diagonal lines as the shuttle mounted a bridge.
Peering down, Hamza could see buildings poke out at him, not too high but big enough. There
was an expanse of gray that stretched to the horizon, spliced by orange from the glass that
winked back the sinking sun’s light.
“Are we on the gold bridge?” someone asked in the back.
“Golden Gate.”
“Idiot.”
“Let’s watch a movie,” Hussain said, as if he hadn’t watched four on the plane.
Hamza nodded passively as the boy flicked his shoulder, waiting for an answer. He was
stuck in a reverie in which he leaped out of the shuttle and ran along the edge of the bridge,
chasing the sun into the depths of concrete. And to think, he would be walking around in it,
pushing his feet into it, knowing its names, Hamza already felt his time there would be gone too
fast.
Their apartment building was on a street corner in the Lower East Side. When he had
first sought out New York for college, he thought he’d stay by himself in one of those artist
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